


Fable of Calcium

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [12]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e02 The Hounds of Baskerville, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, The Adventure of the Empty House, and new ones, excavations regenerations calcifications, old bones & old loves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 10:56:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We don't dig up the bones of old loves; no, rather we...well we can't resurrect what wasn't dead, can we?  If you said, though, *dig up these bones*, I would, he would.  Are you an old love? No, never; never, no.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fable of Calcium

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by two James Wright poems, [ "On the Skeleton of a Hound"](http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MiscpoemsWright.htm) and ["Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium."](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/goodbye-to-the-poetry-of-calcium/) (title from the latter)
> 
> Thank you to [ Chapbook](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ChapBook/profile) for what’s buried under London, [ScienceofObsession](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ScienceofObsession/pseuds/ScienceofObsession) for the ganglia, [Quarryquest](http://quarryquest.livejournal.com/) for the nightjars and pheasants of the moor,[ whitefang 3927](http://archiveofourown.org/users/whitefang3927/pseuds/whitefang3927) for the flame test, and [professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl), for memories in the bones.

_“Whispering men digging for gods might delve_   
_A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn_   
_Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.”--James Wright, "On the Skeleton of a Hound"_

_Those of us who aren't long for this world (or think we aren't) sometimes leave notes. Where are yours?_

_Where were they when I needed them, those messages, notes written on bones, cave paintings, that dispatch from the past._  
  
He wrote that on his blog (an unpublished entry). He looked for the signs and they weren't there.  
  
 I (thinks John) remembered the moor with its mystery, the leavings of animals, deep in the peat the dog-bones and nails, the fossil and shell.  Whatever remains.  
  
They unearthed, once, a bone-handled knife (Antiquated, isn't it John? But useful. The weapons we wield against darkness, whatever form it takes.)  
  
They found themselves once, at a murderer’s grave. (Why did we come here? To mock the dead? No, they won’t be mocked.)

I’m going mad, John thinks, from memory. I found you curled up once, by a drystone wall, fingers on knees in the countryside, re-living an afternoon from your childhood. (Ranging the estate, tearing up fields for moles and _Xestobium rufovillosum_ , finding none. The crossbones of your stories, the fragile beasts you called on, the treasures you dug up, that you still do.)

What would we find under London, John thinks, ancient fish weirs, the scales of fish and men, a mass grave, a volcano, the memory of a sulphurous fog and a north wind, lifting it away.  
  
A whole murderers' row of regret.  
  
 *****  
** Finding Sherlock again isn't like digging up a skeleton. We don't dig up the bones of old loves; no, rather we...well, we can't resurrect what wasn't dead, can we?  If you said, though, _dig up these bones_ , I would; he would, John thinks.  Are you an _old love_? No, never; never, no. Not old. Or old, _old..._

Just not gone.  
  
It’s beautiful, this infrastructure, the way the nerves return.

Molly’s told him, he thinks, about her first body; Lestrade too, Mycroft about a greenstick fracture he had as a child; Sally showed him a nodule on her wrist once, a ganglion, the ghost, he said, of an old injury, the knit of healing, the breaks and wrecks that make us who we are.

Graves in the desert, he thinks, dump sites, old murders, war crimes, bone saws, forensic reconstruction.

And you.  And _you,_ John thinks _._ What did you ever tell me? The bones of your face, distinctive; skull, distinctive (Jesus, all those phrenologists; all those salons, calling back the dead.)

“John,” Sherlock says, “I never told you about my first body, but I’ll tell you about my last.”

*******  
Calcifications, John thinks, malignancies, warnings in the blood.  But now, this wrist, this two-year-old wound: “Knit back together,” he says, stroking a scaphoid,”with calcium. Nothing to be done.”  
  
“It’s tricky,” Sherlock says, “It’s tricky; it won't dissolve, except in acid. Or rather it reacts. Metal, pure, reactive, burns in air, burns the colour of brick in a flame test, makes a cauldron of water...Carbonate’s marine organisms, eye lenses; phosphate’s for bones and teeth.  Bones and teeth and chalk and lime; we’re made of the same stuff London’s built on, and won’t that, shouldn’t that keep us here?”  
  
“Shh,” John says, “you’re rambling, and you know…the Work'll lead you to more, more, what did you say, _burning_ , more…cauldrons, more skeletons, to our own eventually. You’d know. You, who let a skull become your only friend. Maybe it'll take our bones in the ground before...”

“Before what,” Sherlock says, “before I’d tell you, John, that it’s not just transport, that there are memories there?”  
  
Bird. Dog. Human. Mole. Insect exoskeleton. The willow-fractured dinosaur rib. The beak of the nightjar and the pheasant’s claw. The acid turves with their buried things. It’s not just transport. It’s a beautiful world. There are memories there.  
  
“You know," John says, “I wouldn’t kill for your bones; I’d kill for you, your hope, your promise. And if you said...”

No way to say that he’d know, that he _ought to know_. That forgiveness leaches out of graves, out of wars, out of burial grounds like...well, he’d know.

*******

They come home at night now, to the intercostal spaces of Baker, light the candles, stow the weapons, stroke the beakers, soot the grate, fire up the technology, nod to the frames, the shelves, the walls. It can happen again, in the womb, in the flat, in the world, new proto-bones blooming all the time. It’s a good life, too good to bury, or not to unearth. Stay in, then. Stay up or sleep. Sleep and smile in it, curled round like ribs. They’ll go out again in the morning, wristbound, on the scent.

“Yes,” Sherlock says, when John asks,“want this,” (with a blanket, an arm, what’s left of a cup), and the door locks and his arm’s out and the wind shakes the old panes.

Tonight’s in, then; tonight you let the dead sleep, the dead rest, the bones of the London dead lie as they will.

 

**Author's Note:**

> “...I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,  
> The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,  
> The honest bees build honey in the head;  
> The earth knows how to handle the great dead  
> Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,  
> Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.”—James Wright, “On the Skeleton of a Hound”
> 
>  
> 
> “...Your name, all trellises of vineyards and old fire  
> Would quicken to shake terribly my  
> Earth, mother of spiraling searches, terrible  
> Fable of calcium...”—James Wright, “Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium”
> 
>    
> [Mass grave under London reveals volcanic eruption in 1258](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/aug/05/medieval-volcano-disaster-london-graves)
> 
>  
> 
> [ Allosaurus fragilis and fractures](http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/paleontology/pub/fossil_conference_6/breithaupt.htm)
> 
>  
> 
> [Allosaurus in the UK](http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Allosaurus)
> 
>  
> 
> [ Mark Knopfler,“Marbletown”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s70CtGc43A)
> 
>  
> 
> [Tom Waits, “Cold, Cold Ground”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmrGImjmUZk)


End file.
